Through an open window, I hear
      the Big Thompson's steady music
drifting up from the valley below.

May breezes and gentle rains
     coax the snow-capped peaks
to surrender their alabaster cloaks
      downslope into gathering streams.

Silhouetted by light from the waxing moon,
      a cinnamon bear lopes along water’s edge,
pauses for a draught and meanders on.

A bull elk newly coifed with velvet antlers
        folds his legs beneath its belly
and kneels into grasses beside a tranquil pond.
        while the Big Thompson rushes on.

Spring beauties, calypso orchids and geraniums  
       shake off their winter's sleep and
dot every vagabond trail and verdant hill
        while fresh new leaves adorn the aspen boughs.

The Big Thompson inexorably presses on
        bound for rendezvous with time and space
and tumbles into the always patient sea.

© 2017 by Robert Charles Howard

I shall go away
To the brown hills, the quiet ones,
The vast, the mountainous, the rolling,
Sun-fired and drowsy!

My horse snuffs delicately
At the strange wind;
He settles to a swinging trot; his hoofs ***** the dust.
The road winds, straightens,
Slashes a marsh,
Shoulders out a bridge,
Then --
Again the hills.
Unchanged, innumerable,
Bowing huge, round backs;
Holding secret, immense converse:
In gusty voices,
Fruitful, fecund, toiling
Like yoked black oxen.

The clouds pass like great, slow thoughts
And vanish
In the intense blue.

My horse lopes; the saddle creaks and sways.
A thousand glittering spears of sun slant from on high.
The immensity, the spaces,
Are like the spaces
Between star and star.

The hills sleep.
If I put my hand on one,
I would feel the vast heave of its breath.
I would start away before it awakened
And shook the world from its shoulders.
A cicada's cry deepens the hot silence.
The hills open
To show a ***** of poppies,
Ardent, noble, heroic,
A flare, a great flame of orange;
Giving sleepy, brittle scent
That stings the lungs.
A creeping wind slips through them like a ferret; they bow and dance,
answering Beauty's voice . . .

The horse whinnies. I dismount
And tie him to the grey worn fence.
I set myself against the javelins of grass and sun;
And climb the rounded breast,
That flows like a sea-wave.
The summit crackles with heat, there is no shelter, no hollow from
the flagellating glare.

I lie down and look at the sky, shading my eyes.
My body becomes strange, the sun takes it and changes it, it does not feel,
it is like the body of another.
The air blazes. The air is diamond.
Small noises move among the grass . . .

Blackly,
A hawk mounts, mounts in the inane
Seeking the star-road,
Seeking the end . . .
But there is no end.

Here, in this light, there is no end. . .

I wear the vale
and it weathers me
in silty slopes
in harsh-cut lines
it lopes off pieces
of my face.
it floods out my marshes
it clears me clean out
and sterile

I wear the vale
and it's worrisome folk
who take up issue.
"You're wearing the vale!
Wearying th' fields
with dead leaves, and dead things.
Don't you tell us
how to live."

Funny, it's not even sublime
how easy it is
to tell me.

Bang, bang, bang, baaannggg
I dreamed I was dying and goin’ to hiphop heaven
Wow, what a dope sight it was to have seen.

Last night I was shot and arrived at hiphop heaven.
And you know who met me at the big bling gates?
The original kings of da hood themselves, Run DMC.
They said to me, they said, “Bro, the Big Dude of the
hood up here, has told us to show you around the crib.
So come with us.
Now standing on da corner is some of your favourite homies.

“**** I was glad to see them, The Notorious B.I.G. and the maestro of rap Tupac Shakur.

I dreamed I was dead in hiphop heaven
Wow, what a dope sight it was to have seen.

They introduced me to Snoop Dog, and they showed me the Ghetto of Fame with all the gold chains and number one hits up upon da wall.
Then they said, “Bro, walk this way, there are a few more hiphop stars, that I know you’re dying to meet, they’re hangin’ for you.
“There they were chillin’ by the curbside and staring down at me - Eminem and AKA MCA.

Bang, bang, bang, baaannggg

I met all my heroes right from the get go
**** what a privilege to have finally met
Then I asked them, who else do you think will join y’all, uh, say twenty five years from now?

They handed me a book of sheet music covered with graffiti.
They named it the Hood 4 Life Book.
In it, were many names and some were already highlighted in black texta.
I began to scan the pages and saw names such as, Dolla,
Pop Smoke, Juice WRLD, Nipsey Hussle, Easy-E, Lisa Lopes, Nate Dogg, Lil Peep, Jam Master Jay, J Dilla, Proof, Soulja Slim, Big Hawk, Prodigy, Camoflauge, Natina Reed, Charizma, Bloodshed, Big Bank Hank and  Dav E Crockett.

***???
Dav E Crockett?
Oh, well, that's when I woke up, and I'm sorry I did, because

I always dream I’d end up in hiphop heaven
Wow, what a dope sight it would be, y’all be knowin’ what I mean?

freeborn mustang lopes
unchained throughout curtailed life
fur snared in barbed wire

At a stirring in the orchard, she sharply turns.
monument-still she watches, lopes on.
Her mottled grey more coyote-like than *****,
The fiery orange long gone from her wasted frame,
Her once-bushed tail, now hairless, drooping.

An aged ***** in her last winter, moved to stalk
in daylight, up the orchard to the treeline,
Once the hill's best hunter; each year her kits
ferocious players near the now dry brook,
Does she dream, I wonder, of those springs?

Leave her now to time, deep-denned,
where the last sleep's call ends hunger,
hid from the season's creeping chill.
Better there to finish than a trapper's snare,
Better this quiet ending in the *****'s lair.

The Panther scales above the infirmity of the jungle
like a reverent vicar, in her mouth
she clutches an infant. To some this is
the most intoxicating world—so long as you don’t mind
a little ruse, how could there be a day in your whole life
that doesn’t consist of a flurry of happiness?
Below, game lopes abundantly as the ocean tributaries,
each frolicking along a distinctive course, not that
she ever really ruminates over them, or anything else.
The panther has never had to digest a fable,
though her existence propagates an analogous terror.
When predators raid her hearth, they remain
ephemeral, irrelevant – her insatiable hunger the only story
she has ever managed to revisit.
Your skin will never feel her eyes. I cannot say
she is wrong. Piously she prepares her supper,
with its meager, undeveloped vigor, erupting
a contented roar in the conversion of its properties.
She exists the product of her kind, the natural order her excuse
as she scales back above the inconsequence of the jungle
again, to do the same thing
(as I’d longed to do something, anything) perfectly.

A wolf stands firmly
Howling singular notes,
Reaching over the night.
The woodland animals
Hear the plaintif cry
As a lonely echo
Through the air.
We don't care,
But others cower nearby.
The abandoned wail ****** ears,
Confirming all their fears:
Something must die.
Scratching, arching
With fierce yellow eyes,
Snout pointing to the darkling sky,
He howls his hollow cry,
Sounding like his cousin's bark,
He lopes to his den,
Veiled in the dark,
Hoping his warnings
Were not in vain,
The wolf next night
Will wail again.

The collie, fur grayed and patchy, lopes away from his house,
Ostensibly bound for nowhere in particular,
Knowing only that it is that time, his time,
And, as he wanders away for to await that last solitary purpose,
Meanders past a pock-marked and rust-patched single-wide,
Occupied by a young woman (a girl, in truth)
Nursing a newborn, child whose father
Is one in a wide range of unpalatable options.
Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah.

They walk, the residue of some boy meets girl,
Along the quiet main street of an equally quiet town,
Utility poles garnished with benign, contented snowmen,
Low-hung five-pointed auguries strung with tinsel,
Brobodingnagian candy canes swaying rhythmically in the wind.
They have arrived at the unspoken yet mutually understood conclusion
That they have taken their particular accident of birth and geography
As far as such a thing may go, yet they walk hand-in-hand,
Fingers intertwined, though tentatively, in some interim rationale.
Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah.

On a hill above town, there is a rambling, low-slung edifice
Multiple-winged single-story octopus of a house
Well appointed though sparsely and diffidently decorated,
More hotel than home, decidedly transitory in form and function.
In one of the rooms, dimly lit with little ornamentation
Save a Charlie Brown-esque tree squatting forlornly on a bureau,
A woman is reading softly, almost mechanically,
As if it is a story she has read out loud countless times before,
To a man who is heeding, perhaps, though it is clear
That the act is more essential than the words on the page.
They have a daughter who would be there,
Sitting in a chair or on the edge of the bed,
Hands clasped, though in service of or supplication to nothing tangible,
But she is home with her toddler, a whirligig of a child
Who has found some hidden presents
And is tearing away the wrapping from the boxes,
Laughing unrestrainedly as he showers himself
In a red-green-gold ticker-tape maelstrom.
Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah.

I give this last note to Leo that he may race to you while it's words are fresh. He lopes across the night's great canvas with sufficient grace to draw your eye for beauty. Know that my last wish in this waking world is for you to dream all that is daring, and to wake on the morrow and see it in truth. I now bid you goodnight and farewell. We may speak again in the light but now the darkness creeps and my own adventures await.
With love,

Kissinger's in the House today,
trailing choking ****** fumes
kicking aside limbless tiny bodies
too, too innocent by far,
all dripping entrails & shattering
dry bones gladly underfoot
as he lopes horrendously
all death rictus grin & such
as he once again justifies
to St Peter at the gates
the millions crushed, obliterated
blown into tiny misty red fragments
as he played his all-mighty diplomatic
history lessons on a helpless, distant
once green & fertile land.

Forgiveness? Ha!

I still remember that day
Still remember that rainy day
Our First Proximity
Those raindrops and we under one umbrella
Still remember the connections made in lab
That connections connected my heart to yours
Still remember those experiments performed together
Fails laughed upon
Still remember waiting for each other to go home
Still remember travelling together home.
Sitting side-by-side
Still remember those games we played
You being my player 2
Those memories just refuse to fade
Still remember those last moment study we did together
Those late night messages of assignments,
And wishing goodnight after completion.
Still remember waiting for midnight to wish Happy Birthday!
Still remember the increasing distance that led us here
You failed, even I failed.
But those memories still refuse to fade...

©aston_lopes

I can feel my brain floating across
the endless seas, roaring heartbeat,
ravaging bloodshot eyes, relentless grunts,
mugshot mountains, splintering crimson nails,
dangling steel blades piercing my burning ear lopes,
thick peeling skin, rough shifting depiction,
each pounding thought rising in waves,
reverberating into uncontrollable rhymes,
humming and breathing, pausing and beating,
rumbling along the steady surface in shattering
screams, sharp damaging sounds exploding on impact,
spinning in dizzy formations and alternations,
blazing hallucinations hanging in hollow spaces,
stuck in a spiral between the beginning and ending,
twisting and turning in heavy tormenting beats,
drifting into whirling velocities along the shores
of a drumming existence, destructive electricity
soaring in a dimension of brokenness,
breaking biology disintegrating in a maze
of distant shadows, withering physics lost
in the screaming walls of no bridges,
fallen English disassembled, slammed in crammed
gutters, annihilated without explanation,
as the rugged landscape gazed at the brutal crime scene,
how the darkened canvas sizzled in sharp syllables
and crackling flames

I know how I will meet my soulmate: I have gone over it a hundred times, told it to all my friends,
and they all agree.

There will be a club, or a bar, or a party, some dim-lit place with colored lights, cold glasses if we've graduated past solo cups,

I will be there with a friend or two, because I am not an idiot, but we will not hang on each-other like we do now, because we will be a little more like adults.

So I will be alone, when it happens: There will be an *******, like there always is, some man who smells like beer and entitlement,
drunk and leering at me.

And I will scowl, my fists ready at my sides, not a wallflower and not a doormat, words ready on my tipsy lips.

But then there he is, shooting out of nowhere as the ******* reaches for me, the frantic chaos of a fight erupting in the middle of the room as they go at it, lasting until someone shouts loud enough to find a man big enough to throw them both out.

For a moment, I wait as they are hustled out the door, I wait by the window or the door as I can hear the ******* yelling something as his slurred voice fades away, I wait and I look back at my friend who nods to me, her face a puzzle under the colored lights.

"Be careful," she mouths at me and I nod, pulling open the door to let in the night, pulling down my short skirt as I step out onto the sidewalk to see him sitting there on the curb, looking up at the sky.

I sit down beside him and look at him for the first time, his face lit up by the nearby streetlight, the neon signs of cheap restaurants, and he is beautiful and his smile is a permanent smirk and his dark hair is a perfect mess and his eyes are dark like mine and he looks at me and is puzzled.

"Thank you," I say, and then: "Are you okay?"

He turns his head towards me and I can see the blood on his face, his split lip trailing a dark line down his neck, a stripe across his right cheek making him look like some kind of warrior, and his jacket is dark, almost too big for him, for he is not a large man at all, much smaller than the ******* had been.

"It's nothing," he says with a smile, and he looks at me as if he has never seen anyone like me before, and we introduce ourselves and we talk and the stars come out in the narrow strip of sky between the buildings, and when a crazy man lopes down the street, he takes my hand and pulls me to his side, instantly alert.

He is a little drunk, too, and the words pour out of him easily, and he is not too old and not too young, and he traces my skin and when I go in to kiss him without thinking about it, he tastes a little bit like the blood from his lip, and I realize and I say:

"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to hurt you," and he kisses me again and I make sure to text my friend before I go over to his place, promise her that I will be okay, promise her that I trust this boy with bruised knuckles and a ****** face.

I will be in love with him from that first night, though I will not tell him until he is ready to hear it, and he will not be a simple sort of man to love and live with, but he will be the same boy I have always loved, dark eyes lighting on my face, my partner-in-crime, a little too much and yet exactly enough.

title: cull
body: parabola's tails.

thank god, she appreciated the flowers,
i even replied her:
beside the past times i bought flowers,
for mother's day and for my grandfather's funeral:
it felt greatly appealing to buy flowers
for someone selfishly... with a wound to the heart
that only can craft...
on my cards... not a career... just a job...
no family beside the one i kept that
"abandoned" me from the ages of 4 through to 8...
creative? i might consider that true...
will this translate into economic success?
doubt it...
      dating prospects? single mothers...
job's already done...
   but she did appreciate the flowers...
       hey... but there's a square of mile of forest
that needs to be chopped...
and i don't feel like wasting too much paper...
will this somehow fall into the hands of
Hades... most probably...
but at least i have focus on something that
doesn't allow me to watch t.v. like a zombie
and simply allow myself my lot...
i'll take risks when cycling...
because: well... even if i were rock-climbing...
that's nothing...
i want to be able to trust people driving
their cars, their trucks...
to be a traffic shepherd on a bicycle...
                    sometimes it works...
only today on a roundabout i forced my way
into a turn... extended my hand
in a fashion of an apology... the car slowed
and allowed me through...
it's not much of a life... but...
it's bearable compared to some lives i witness...
there's nothing but a translation of
matter... an exchange of ****** functions
into... passable activities that... could be...
i'm still thinking about her...
all my intellectual curiosities i once found
so available have taken a back-seat...
i've lost interest in philosophy,
i've lost interest in the Qabbalah...
in the katana and the Hangul...
in diacritical markers...
in the Greek script, in the Cyrillic script...
in Runes and in the Glagolitic script...
but... come to think of it...
she would be an impossible catch even if
we met in our 20s...
i'd be the madman... she's be working in
a finance firm earning enough money
to buy herself her own home...
i'd be rummaging in the forest
at night... howling at the moon...
           taking off my shirt... drinking...
going to the brothel...
n'ah... it wouldn't have ever worked...
                        the impossibly terrifying has already
happened...
in the back of my mind i know that
this will not probably work...
of any man's worst nightmare...
but this little light at the end of the tunnel...
resurrected me...
i started to dream a little, to hope a lot...
what a pretty, pretty face...
living in England since i was 8 years old...
i always wanted to have a British girlfriend...
they always escaped me...
now i have a shot...
it's not perfect... far from it...
but... i can't help but swoon toward the chance...
- woke up this morning with
too much phlegm in my throat and my nose...
by the end of the day my mysterious cold
was gone... i was breathing silently and easily...
love-sick fool! love-sick idiot!
you fell in love you fell into a stereotypical illness
that isn't really an illness come to think of it...
you texted her... that country artist you like...
what's his name?
she replies... Gerry Cinnamon...
well, i'll be listening to him tonight...
i sent her my folk choice of music:
In Extremo - Miss Gordon of Gight...
   maybe this one time i can forget about being alone
throughout my 20s... my 30s weren't so bad...
but my 20s? a complete and utter blur...
some people were busy living...
others were bust going mad...
        sure... if i didn't have my spectacular meltdown
aged 21... by the age of 35 i might be in
a better economic situation...
but then again: would i really want that?
i wouldn't have read as much...
i wouldn't have admired the forest at night...
that she's 39 and i'm 35 and we can still
exchange music tastes like an 18 year old with
a 17 year old... when i used to make mix-tapes
and read Nick Hornby's High Fidelity...
everyone looks so old all of a sudden...
my... life can be so bountiful if you find the right
sort of avenues...
you don't need that much to get by...
there's plenty of enough to get by "without"
plenty... just enough, just enough...
                    i'm satisfied with this little corner
of enough-"not-enough"...
just a woman that loves to sing,
just a woman that feels happy when she's cooking...
that has to run from the kitchen
while she's cooking to giggle and dance in
the garden...
that's... just about right... that's just about
enough of what i need...
just about right if she's merely thinking of me...
that's ******* plenty...
and what a beauty she's to look at...
she's kind to almost everyone she interacts with...
she has a high work ethic...
she's there: on the spot...
and then frees herself from the role...
how she fell, how she picked herself up...
she's all whizz-kid with the D.I.Y.:
i could cook for her...
i could... oh... my little oh... i no longer find it
necessary to find a why... why:
i'm going to send her another link...
the Leveller's Carry Me...

hell... if she's into folk... let's go through the whole
spectrum... we'll do the German songs,
the Dutch, the English...

of course she had to have some Scotch roots...
i even told her...
Edinburgh for me is as if it might be Paris...
idiot-in-love...
well thank god im not in my 70s...
how Prof. Xavier says to Logan...
'there's still time...'
and there's me... flushing mortality down the toilet
with the drunken antics i'm all about...
but i'd rather love so recklessly drunk
than... fall into a sober disbelief
for the sole purpose of up-keeping
longevity... no! nein! niet! nie! non!

               i want to love akin to:
you chance is gone, dearest little dove...
when i had my ills, when i had my greatest
troubles... i pulled ip my kilt...
i danced the infernal cèilidh!
           tartans ahoy!
              burry me in the mountains...
speak my name to the Lochs...
               then. simply. forget me!
i'm going elsewhere, i'm...
                    to loved up to be simply hurt...
i'll be waiting at the turnstiles of
how mind disintegrates from
its possession of matter...
    like the thrills of taking a gasping breath...

never take this away from me...
this love sickening disgrace...
i should have been prettily coupled from my early
20s and into my 30s...
already with the baggage of children...
yet here i am... reliving teenager feelings...
lucky? or unlucky me?

i can't stop look at her face...
the last WhatsApp profile picture she took i had
to screenshot... because...
i didn't want to forget her face
in that moment... i wanted her face
to burn into me...

    if this is love? eh... not so bad...
i could give up a decade of living for feel these few
days in my life...
Gerry Cinnamon's... Canter..
didn't Green Day do the same, more politely...
with Time of Your Life?
lyric-wise? i imagine they did...

what a babe... what a *****-nilly lass...
thank god i went to see all those prostitutes...
the male argument about a body count
i'll never mind...
i just want a girl out of a grift from a per se
perspective...
i want to turn a woman into a girl...
i want her all giddy... all afraid...
i want her to be fresh in her own mind
before she gave up too much that she
gave so much away...
i want her... mine...

          i don't care, i don't mind...
i'm not prizing idiocy on my own worth...
last come: at least served...
by now i don't even mind not having my biological
counterpart of little Frankie or
Franklin...
              missed the "boat": forgot about the "train"...
round about now there's only a story of:
well... me might as well enjoy each other's company...
let's try that...
that's enough goodness to want
to attempt at working at it...

no... all the self-help gurus and psychologists
are... right about... now... turning...
into placebos... i'm not listening...
i have my own demands that need to be
met... i'm terribly in love...
i'm bound to a love that's so delusional
that... it's just about right: to stomach
life's realism..

i've sacrificed giving my infatuation
to prostitutes... i've stopped loving
objectively... i posit this as the highest plus...
i want to fall in love with a narrative of a person...
i sifted through... 4 great examples...
i made my mark... which i gave flowers to,
the chess board is set...
now let us see the moves;

come... little arrogant... come a little naked...
come, coy doe...
               i'll be waiting... i'll wait a little while
longer... i'll wait as long as it is necessary...
come... let me ensnare you...
i don't want to merely have you...
i... want to: overcome you...
it's not enough to want...
i want to touch you once you submit...
like i might be touching a mollusk...
and oyster...
i need to open you up... and pry on your
weakness...
what you once reserved for
abusive males...
now i need a return's policy that
puts me in the driving seat...
              oh... now we're going to dance, proper...
it might take us... weeks... months...
i don't care... there are chances that
other women will come in-between: as it has
already happened...
  
            but i'll wait... i'll be waiting...
i mean... landing a girl with a body of a 39 year old...
in her prime... mentally...
i'm going to become a broth of predator and a leech...
no... i'm not going to stop... shyly...
then vigorously... then shyly again..
then vigorously once more... nibbling at her...

let's see what she makes of me...
silly idiot...
       ooh.... i can just imagine it now...
transcending the casual... "non-confrontational" touch
of the hands... with a bite at the lips...
with a bite at the lips...
   imagining her exposure of the thighs...
the grooves in her ear-lopes...
between her knuckles...
        how petite she already is:
how smaller she will reveal herself to be
under my touch...
a project worth dying for, worth living forth:
for.

The heater lopes
behind me, so
I don't hear you
rugging your way
up the stairs
with your gun.

When you point
it towards me,
the lights switched
on yesterday.

What is the definition of one man's sanity
In a hope of finding something clear in his clarity
And yet to be a custom to something of not
Tying the endless lopes of a never ending knot.

Often there's a lot of things in life I can't really handle,
Burnt out like an old waxy candle.

Asking myself where you place your own loyalty at
Be it the love, girls, money or fame, tell me where your own clarity at.
If this be the last days on this Earth what would you have done
Who or what would be the last you hold in your arm till it all became to none.

And what would be the point at a cutting's edge.
Where would falling man hang by the close peeks of the ledge.
What close cards are you holding to the dealt hand
What's the fallen tears you're hiding in the Ocean's sand.

Often so in life there's days I could be feeling so rich
Yet old days I feel drowned out in an empty ditch.

Buying fake love yet for the moment feels so easy to get
But my mistake would be for taking it all as real. Placed my heart out there amongst the playing set.

But I couldn't bare to be alone,
Living in a big house all on my own,
Have no close friends call me on the phone,
Blowing birthday candles, eating my ice cream in an empty cone.

I just wouldn't want to be alone.

Sometimes though I could drive myself to be paranoid
Working the hardest of days on my heart but never be employed.

I'd hate to think that I ain't at people's level or in their atmosphere,
Or to think that I could be all that's left coming out of the Earth's rear.

This could be an endless Black Paranoia.

I may have three ear lopes
But there just ears
Not ment to be perfect
But unique

I may have piercings
But they are just that
A look
Handed down from my ancestors
To be unique


My hair might be
Be short
I look like a guy
But I really don’t care about
What you think



Thank you

as summer
lopes
with days
more doggy
than ever

it seems
keen sight
has given way

to acute hearing
of things

like a clock ticking
and putting down

bottom
to the soundtrack
of my life

and when i hear
my cat's meow
and see the red

yellow green
pop and flash
behind my eyes

outstanding

I tell him
as he limps
on his clubfoot

by me
into the haze
of this magic afternoon

Whit Howland © 2020

My mind is a forest. A tiger dwells there.
He burns as he paces to measure his lair.
His flaming flanks trail a meshed veil of cervelt;
His neck is encircled with a twisted belt.
He lopes with a measured and leisurely stride,
His tail thrashes wildly, his eyes blank-shine wide.
The flailing mesh snarls in each close-tangled twig,
Constricting his step as it locks bud-green sprig.
The woven belt tightens around tender throat;
His strength turns to weakness, a tethered scapegoat.
The forest is his, to explore as he will,
Forever impeded; his freedom will ****.